lunes, febrero 29, 2016

Jay Walljasper: Every Community Should be Safe for Walking

EXCERPT:Jaw-dropping silence seized the room as Bullard showed a succession of maps illustrating how historic segregation and current poverty strongly correlate with low levels of walking and childhood opportunity as well as with high levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. “Health disparities don’t just happen by accident,” he explained. They are the tragic legacy of racism and unequal economic opportunity.Ron Sims, who sponsored some of the first research identifying zip codes as a key determinant of health while chief executive of King County, Washington, noted. “If you have parks, playgrounds, community gardens, and wide sidewalks, you have good health outcomes. If you have walkable communities kids will do better in school…seniors will be healthier.”Drawing on his experience as an activist in African-American neighborhoods of Seattle as well as a former Deputy US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he mapped out a blueprint for healthy communities: new or improved sidewalks, better lighting, access to water and greenspace, a place for kids to play around, a place for aging adults and senior citizens to feel they belong.

Winona LaDuke with Mililani Trask, Conversation, 24 February 2016

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg. She is an indigenous rights activist, an environmentalist, an economist, and a writer, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation and for sustainable development. She founded and for 25 years served as executive director of the White Earth Land Recovery Program, and is currently executive director of Honor the Earth, a national Native American foundation. She has served on the boards of the Indigenous Women’s Network and Greenpeace USA, and twice ran as the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate.LaDuke has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. Among her books are The Militarization of Indian Country (2011), All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, and Recovering the Sacred (both books to be re-issued later this year by Haymarket Books).LaDuke talked about climate change and climate justice in the indigenous peoples’ communities, followed by a talk with Mililani Trask.

Simon Owens: Email newsletters are the new zines

Caroline Crampton isn’t lacking for an audience. A longtime political journalist, she’s been a web editor for the New Statesman, the 103-year-old British political and cultural magazine, since 2012. In addition to penning articles for the magazine, she also co-hosts a pop culture podcast with her colleague Anna Leszkiewicz. She has an active Tumblr blog, 4,000 followerson Twitter, and even occasionally appears as a commentator on mainstream news programming.

Yet every week Crampton sits down to write So far, I’ve had no complaints, a newsletter she sends out each Friday. With most issues clocking in at about 1,000 words, So far, I’ve had no complaints is broken down into several eclectic and mostly unrelated sections — “Things to read,” a mixture of blockquotes and commentary on what she considers the best journalism published that week; “Things to listen to,” a roundup of podcasts she recommends; “Things to watch,” assorted web videos; “Compulsory medieval thingamabob,” a strange image that I can only infer came from a medieval painting or illustration; and “The guest gif,” which is basically just an amusing GIF to close out the newsletter.

Crampton launched the newsletter in 2014 after noticing how newly-popularized link aggregators that focused on highlighting serious, in-depth journalism — Longform, Longreads,The Browser — were rather homogeneous with their selections. “They were patrolling the same beat where everything serious or good coincidentally happened to be written by men about men,” she told me in a phone interview. “And this made me so cross because there are so many other great things out there on the internet written by all kinds of people doing all sorts of things.” She’d complain to her colleagues about this but they always replied with the same solution: “They said, ‘If you care so much about this then why don’t you point people toward things that you think are great?’”

From NPR's Bullseye with Jesse Thorn:Paul F. Tompkins has a certain kind of fame. If you're a comedy fan, he is known and beloved for his appearances on comedy podcasts (including his own) or from his live stand up and improv comedy. But to the world at large, he's probably best known for his work as a writer and performer on the HBO cult comedy show Mr. Show with Bob and David.In recent years, he's started his own improv podcast, Spontaneanation with Paul F. Tompkins, and also currently hosts the show No, You Shut Up! on the Fusion network.No, You Shut Up! is a talk show in the vein of "Meet the Press", if its talking heads were actually puppets from Henson Alternative. The show airs Thursday nights at 10pm on Fusion. Episodes are also available on YouTube.Tompkins joined Jesse to talk about what it feels like to become more personal in his stand-up, the role of podcasting in his success and what it’s like to improvise with puppets.

sábado, febrero 27, 2016

CIA-Cuba negotiations, the real story

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB542-Oscars-Bridge-of-Spies-the-Sequel/Oscars: "Bridge Of Spies," The Sequel'Meta-Diplomat' James Donovan (Tom Hanks), Subject of Best Film Nomination, Won Massive Prisoner Release in CubaOnce-secret CIA and White House records reveal Donovan's mission to negotiate normal relations with Castro, provide historical backdrop to Obama's forthcoming trip to CubaCIA established secret task force to support Donovan-Castro negotiations

Washington D.C., February 26, 2016 – With covert support from the CIA, James Donovan, who is the central figure in the Oscar-nominated movie, “Bridge of Spies,“ conducted the first secret negotiations ever with Fidel Castro, according to White House and CIA records posted today by the National Security Archive--providing a little-known historical foundation for President Obama’s forthcoming trip to Cuba.

The documents show that in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, Donovan engaged Castro in discussions on improving U.S. relations with Cuba and predicted that, eventually, “an accommodation of views could be worked out.“

viernes, febrero 26, 2016

NY Public Library: The Future of (US) Black History

"Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Jay-Z, and Zadie Smith are just a few among the black authors and creators we'll hear from this week. In our 100th episode, we present the men and women making black history today, from music moguls to authors, chefs to television stars. Please join us for a look at of some of the most incredible guests The New York Public Library and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have had the privilege to host."In order of appearance:Marcus SamuelssonNtozake ShangeCharles BlowTavis SmileyGeorge Clinton (with Paul Holdengraber)Shaquille O'NealTimbaland (with William Jelani Cobb)Ta-Nehisi Coates (with Khalil Gibran Muhammad)RuPaulToni Morrison & Angela DavisZadie Smith & Chimamanda AdichieJay-Z (with Cornel West)Jesmyn Ward (with William Jelani Cobb & Khalil Gibran Muhammad)Toni MorrisonZadie Smith

The Politics of Opportunism and Capitulation: The Myth of Dolores Huerta

EXCERPTS:The UFW had tensions of its identity as both a union and a social movement. The reports show that the UFW shifted its focus to social movement based non-profit and for profit ventures, with many of the money making ventures run by Chavez family members and other insiders. It received millions in donations, grants and public funds for its various projects, and today few of those resources go to union organizing. It has fewer union members than anytime before, and gets a small percentage of its income from union dues. Also, farm workers are still suffering exploitative conditions.Furthermore, Chavez became more authoritarian in his leadership, wanting absolute loyalty from his staff and control of decisions of the union. Many organizers and members left or were pushed out. The UFW history includes other unsavory political actions such as red baiting, anti-immigration actions, and even support of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.******She has traded her influence for positions of power. Politicians seek out her endorsement, knowing that her status can bring out votes. Those votes are of course for the Democrats and no one else. Her strategy she advocates to the people is voting and running for office. No discussion on other ways of gaining and holding power. In 2003, she supported Gray Davis for governor in his recall campaign waged against him. Before he left office Davis appointed Huerta to the Board of Regents of the University of California system.

lunes, febrero 22, 2016

The dubious legacy of César Chávez, by Randy Shaw

EXCERPT:The UFW managed, despite long odds, to organize farm workers, attract thousands of talented volunteers to its banner, build a feared grassroots political action machine, defeat the Teamsters and the sweetheart contracts it had signed with growers, and win passage of a farm workers’ labor law unmatched by any other such statute in the country. By 1977, the union was poised to achieve a mass membership that would have made it a power to be reckoned with in California, and maybe in the entire nation.But then, under Chávez’s autocratic leadership, the union dissolved the boycott staff, firing its leader and accusing him of being a communist; purged its staff, using the most disgusting means imaginable; refused to entertain any local union autonomy and democracy; denied the election of actual farm workers to the union board; ruined the careers, and in some cases, the jobs, of rank-and-file union dissidents; lost almost all of its collective bargaining agreements, and began a long and ugly descent into corruption.Today, farm workers in California are no better off than they were before the union came on the scene. They still don’t often live past fifty; they still suffer the same job-related injuries and illnesses; they still don’t have unions; they are still at the bottom of the labor market barrel. How is all of this not an important, indeed critical, legacy of the UFW? If we judge the union and Chávez in terms of the well-being of the workers they set out to organize, both must be judged utter failures. If we compare the UFW to any number of the CIO’s left-led unions, for example, the United Packinghouse Workers of America, the Farmworkers pale by comparison. The UPWA was not only a multiracial and democratic union. It also led the struggle to end segregation at work and in the workers’ communities, and it put the pay of the black and immigrant laborers who did the unenviable work of slaughtering the animals we eat on a par with those of steel and auto workers.A union is supposed to organize workers and improve their lives. Chávez and the UFW had their chances, and they threw them away.

sábado, febrero 20, 2016

Alex Emmons: 5 Questions for CIA Director John Brennan

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/19/5-questions-for-cia-director-john-brennan/Question 3: Why did you deny hacking Senate computers?After Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of breaking into computers being used by Senate staffers, Brennan publicly insisted that “we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”But that’s exactly what happened. And according to a report by the CIA inspector general, Brennan had told unnamed CIA employees early on to “use whatever means necessary” to find out how the Senate obtained privileged documents, and had been briefed along the way. Brennan’s denial was such a blatant lie that members of Congress called for his resignation.

Trevor Noah on Fresh Air

Growing up in South Africa with a white father and a black mother, Trevor Noah confronted prejudices on both sides. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that both white people and black people would express fear and biases to him. Then, he says, "I'd have to explain to them, 'Hey, you can't think like that. You can't hold these views, because you're generalizing everybody.' "

His experience growing up enables him to see both sides of an issue — which helps when it comes to creating political satire on The Daily Show. "I've understood multiple experiences simultaneously," he says. "That's something I've always done and I continue to do till this day: I try and see the perspective of the other side."

miércoles, febrero 17, 2016

Professor Miguel Altieri - Agroecology and Climate Change

Miguel Altieri is a Professor at Berkeley's College of Natural Resources. His laboratory is involved in several field projects in California where they are testing ideas of landscape ecology applied to agriculture such as the use of biological corridrs in pest management. The idea is to explore whether corridors can break the nature of monocultures by serving as a conduit for the dispersion of natural enemies within the field thus enhancing thier impact on pest population. The effects of summer cover crops on insect pest populations and associated natural enemies is also being examined in vineyards. Of special interest is to determine whether timing mowing cover crops in alternate rows can force movement of beneficials to adjacent vines to exert pest suppression. His group is also engaged in collaborative work with a number of universities, NGOs and research centers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2016/feb/12/welcome-to-britain-with-ben-judah-and-sunjeev-sahota-books-podcastAs migration continues to dominate the headlines, we go walkabout in a capital city transformed by new arrivals with Ben Judah, while Sunjeev Sahota explores home and identity in SheffieldThe biggest wave of mass migration since the second world war saw more than a million people arrive in Europe through irregular means in 2015, but what do they find when they arrive? We head for the streets of London with Ben Judah, who paints a picture of despair in a city where 37% of its inhabitants were born abroad. He explains how expectation is seldom matched by reality and explores how reportage can give a human dimension to the patterns of history. Then we travel to the Sheffield of Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways to meet his cast of illegal immigrants, on the run from impossible lives and trying to carve a future for themselves on the margins of 21st-century Britain.

Toni Morrison and Angela Davis are two of the most necessary and brilliant intellectuals of our time. Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written several novels, plays, works of children's literature, and nonfiction. Scholar, activist, and author Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a group working to end the prison industrial complex. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Toni Morrison and Angela Davis discussing connecting for progress.

Angela Davis and Toni Morrison

One of Morrison's most intriguing positions is that the enactment of violence is equivalent to self-destruction. In answer to one question, she discussed the detriment of homophobia to the homophobic:

"Homophobia—it’s so obviously—the violence connected with that, it’s so obviously a destruction of the self, I mean it’s just blatant, you know, to me, this others, or maybe people don’t realize it so much, but calling people names and beating them up and hanging people off of fences, I mean it’s just so self-destructive, you know. The more vicious it is toward the so-called homosexual person, the more violence there is toward oneself in that, and I think that that, you know, distributes itself in other kinds of scapegoats."

Morrison spoke about the way the power of language to define our identities. In particular, she was interested in the social potential of the word "citizen":

"Citizen suggests some relationship with your neighbors, your block, your town, with the village. After World War II they stopped using that word and we were consumers. That’s all you could hear, the American consumer this and the American consumer that. And we bought things for status and that’s what we were supposed to do. Now, what are we? We are taxpayers. All of a sudden, it’s about my little tax, my little money, I don’t want to give it to the government, those people who should not have it. You know, the people, we talk about capitalism sort of seeping into the blood, they just change the language and redefine us and we go for it. My driver was fussing about his taxes. I said, “so what? You pay taxes, so what?” But you know, all of a sudden we lose who we are, or are redefined. And when the language changes, we change. The labels change, so all of a sudden it’s about taxes. If I hear any something else about taxes—but if we were still citizens, that’s a different thing. We feel some obligation. We don’t pass by people."

Davis, too, emphasized the importance of sociality in actualizing positive change. She spoke against neoliberal ideologies and American exceptionalism in favor of engagement:

"We only think of ourselves as individuals. We don’t think about possible connections, broader connections with communities that are not only in the U.S. but that are in other parts of the world as well. It seems to me that this is the real challenge of this period even for people who consider themselves progressive in a country like the United States of America, because we also are—we also imagine ourselves as somewhat different from the rest of the people in the world, you know, American exceptionalism has its impact even on those who pretend to be most radical, exactly. And so what would it take, what would it take to create a connection with that community I was speaking about? There are about seven thousand people, Afro-descended Colombians, many of whom still have African names because they have created a history and a culture that goes back to resistance against slavery and they’re still resisting. As a matter of fact they received an eviction order for August 18th, and they refused to leave... [W]ritten protest is a process that could perhaps help us feel as if we are making community, we are reaching out beyond ourselves and that we have emotional connections with people who live on this mountain, in this village called La Toma."

You can subscribe to the New York Public Library Podcast to hear more conversations with wonderful artists, writers, and intellectuals. Join the conversation today!

sábado, febrero 13, 2016

Longform Podcast #179: Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton

“I’m just trying to follow my curiosities. You know how kids always ask the best questions because they haven’t lost the will to live? I’m just desperately trying to keep that childish curiosity about the world. Is that horribly depressing?”

lunes, febrero 08, 2016

Teju Cole at Lannan Foundation

Teju Cole, writer, art historian, photographer and photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, is the author of the novella Every Day is for the Thief, named a book of the year by The New York Times. Of his novel Open City, Time Magazine said, “A powerful and unnerving inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James, but Open City merits higher praise: it’s a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive.”

Teju Cole has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, Aperture,The Atlantic, Granta, and several other publications. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, published in a number of journals, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy.

Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria, Cole currently lives in Brooklyn. A recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, Teju Cole is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College and is currently at work on a book-length nonfiction narrative of Lagos, Nigeria.

In this episode, he joins in conversation with Amitava Kumar. The companion Reading episode may be found here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Puerto Rico has been fighting Wal-Mart at least since 2001, Carmelo Ruiz

PUERTO RICO: Local Businesses Threatened by Megastores

SAN JUAN, May 23 2001 (IPS) - Locally-owned small and medium-sized businesses are being displaced by foreign-owned megastore chains, such as Wal- Mart, with nefarious consequences for the local economy, warns the Puerto Rico United Retailers Association (Centro Unido de Detallistas/CUD).The organisation, which represents close to 20,000 businesses that provide a combined total of over 200,000 jobs, is fighting the proliferation of these giant retail outlets through public education campaigns in the media, legislative lobbying and litigation.

The CUD has sometimes sued Puerto Rico government agencies, accusing them of not enforcing their own rules when it comes to construction permits for giant retailers.

This Caribbean island, which measures 100 miles from east to west, currently has 22 million square feet of shopping malls, not counting hallways and parking lots, according to Estudios Técnicos, a local consulting firm.

NPR report on Amazon bookstores

Last November, Amazon did the unthinkable for an online retailer known for undercutting brick-and-mortar bookstores: It opened a walk-in store in Seattle. Now, there's talk that Amazon plans hundreds of them.

On an investor call Tuesday, Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of mall operator General Growth Properties, said: "You've got Amazon opening bricks and mortar bookstores, and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores."

The point Mathrani was making was that retailers that started off online — like Bonobos and Warby Parker — are now increasingly in the market for physical locations. But his seemingly off-the-cuff comment triggered a report in The Wall Street Journal, and then dozens of other news stories about how Amazon — having killed off some major bookstore chains — is now laying plans to become one itself.